We sorted through our suitcases, still half-packed, looking for the nicest stuff from our wardrobe, a few combinations that worked for the jobs back in Buckthorn and might serve in Vegas too. Honey had the edge in the fashion department, but she was always willing to share.
Have I conveyed her elegance — she would have scoffed at the term — when she gathered up her hair and slipped a plastic chopstick from the debris of yesterday’s takeout into it, the fine hairs under her raised arms, her beautiful hands as she slipped her sandals on — the same hands that could, among other things, push a man’s car into the lake (with him in it), toss away his keys, and remain incapable of a false move, a clumsy gesture.
After we were all set to go she pulled me close, drawing me into one of those notorious movie lines that I thought I’d tire of someday but never did.
“Maybe you shouldn’t dress like that,” she said. I picked up on it easily: a Ned Racine line to Matty Walker, the seductive, conniving femme fatale in Body Heat. I could hardly pass up such a meaty part, under the circumstances.
“It’s just a blouse and skirt. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then you shouldn’t wear that body,” she whispered next to my ear. And then the usual, yet so unusual, happened and we had to get dressed all over again.
Two hours later off we went, blinking and shading our eyes in the harsh desert light. We had thought it was dusk and were going for dinner, but in fact the sun was rising, not setting. We laughed and altered course.
We took a cab to The Egg & I on West Sahara Avenue, a diner I’d read about in the brochures, and there we devoured man-sized servings of eggs benny, French toast, extra sides of fries. Honey said we probably looked like our car had broken down a month ago and we’d just staggered in, starving from the desert. “That’s how I feel,” I said.
We sat at a table next to a giant mural that I thought looked like something straight out of Buckthorn County before everything went downhill; imagine that, coming all this way: big sky with puffy white clouds and a farm pasture, red brick house, truck rumbling by in the foreground, a lake minus an MG with a dead body inside tucked into the forest behind.
Afterwards we caught another cab back to our neck of the woods and strolled down to the Bellagio fountains, then browsed the 40,000-foot Bonanza gift shop on Las Vegas Boulevard.
“What fantastic, tacky shit,” Honey said, delighted. “Can you imagine my mother here?”
“Can you imagine mine?” We drew a bit of attention to ourselves yukking it up over that one, and then, you know, wanting to cry.
She was wearing a pair of Elvis mirror sunglasses with slick dark sideburns attached to them when her phone rang. She swore and said she meant to leave the damn phone back at the suite.
“Fucking telemarketers have followed me all the way to Vegas. I saw what you did, and I know who you are,” she whispered into the phone, another classic midnight movie line from our youth, and hung up. She asked what I thought of her new look and I admitted that sideburns looked just as alluring on her as they did on the King.
The following day we rose late, had breakfast in our suite, watched a movie, and then about 5 o’clock Honey said she might go down to the hotel casino and gawk at the high rollers. She didn’t say we should go down, but that’s because I needed a nap. I hadn’t slept well the previous evening; up half the night worrying and wandering around the absentees — my name for all that acrylic furniture, which was even harder to see in the dark.
When I woke later and swept the bedroom drapes aside, that glittering Vegas nighttime panorama lay stretched out on the horizon once again, and then fell off into darkness. My phone said 8 p.m. — three hours since Honey had left, so I called her. No answer. Maybe she’d decided to lay some bets and turned it off so she could concentrate or couldn’t hear over the racket and commotion of all that cash being gambled away.
I dressed and went looking for her.
* * *
Thirty minutes of aimless wandering left me stymied. I called her again. Nothing. So I continued revolving under the faux-starry sky, the playing cards fanning and folding, the neon hubbub broken by pockets of cool, silent shade.
Apart from the high-roller rooms and the poor folk gambling areas, the casino had a bunch of restaurants and compact eateries, as well as two party-clubs, one at ground level and the other on the twenty-first floor. I toured all of them, with an odd, dreamy sense that everything — the eating, gambling, and losing — took place not in a casino but in a wreck at the bottom of the sea, and any minute the windows would implode and the ocean would leave us drifting through the rooms, all splayed out in our fancy clothes, the stars twinkling merrily overhead.
I called her again, got peeved, and then thought to hell with it, I’d have a drink in the Amber Room, the ground floor club. I vowed to let the phone ring if she called me, and she could stew and fret for a change, but I knew I wouldn’t, that I’d pick up right away.
Concave mirrors lined the curved walls of the circular bar all the way round the perimeter of the dance floor from entrance to exit, though both were a challenge to find again once you were stuck in the deep, thumping heart of the place. Ten or so “mixologists” in gleaming white shirts and caramel colored bowties kept busy over their beakers, blending an array of fantastical cocktails, the racks above their heads lined with oddly shaped glasses, like the interior of a fractured geode.
I stood at the bar, midway into the curve, watching the dancers move to the rhythm of a Latin beat as splinters of miniature rainbows spangled the darkness. Then the tune dropped and segued into one of those lush disco numbers Inez loved, the backbeat first, a little guitar, and then a whole brass section coming up behind, and whatever else Donna Summer needed to get things going first thing in the morning over at the Ramones’.
I didn’t recognize her at first. I don’t know why, because it goes without saying I would have known her anywhere. The same blue shift. That little purse with the narrow strap across her body. She was dancing. My mind went back to her and me dancing to the old records we played on my grandmother’s old turntable. I was just about to join her when the music transitioned to something slower and I realized what had thrown me: she had a dance partner.
She seemed self-conscious with the guy at first, and that was unlike her; so confident in her body, so fluid in every movement, but now hesitant, though never awkward, in this man’s arms — until she slipped out of them again, the song changing to a slow jive. Several shadowy figures revolved around them, like cold, dark planets in comparison to her lightness, her casual beauty. Even her tentative movements, the way her hand eluded his as she moved away, her little mistakes, only emphasized her physical grace. She knew her instrument, and — how should I put it — how to improvise error into a kind of magic that was so much better than perfection. She always had.
I ordered a scotch and drank it down quick, and then stood gazing at my face in the mirror behind the bar, now blue, then violet, then streaked with tainted gold. I felt as though a hundred hours had passed before she joined me, breathless.
She called me several times, she said, and then assumed I’d turned the phone off, or couldn’t hear it over the noise. “It’s lousy reception in here anyway.”
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” I said. “And then I came down here and had a couple of drinks because, frankly, I was pissed with you.”
“Come on,” she said and took my arm. “Let’s get the hell out of here before twinkletoes comes back for another spin around the dance floor.”
In the elevator we didn’t speak all the way up. But no sooner had the door closed behind us than she pulled me close and kissed me — my mouth, my neck, and back again — her hands in my hair.
I thought she had made me feel everything by then, or at least more than I ever dreamed, and now we’d just start over again and travel down familiar terrain into
a kind of expected bliss, the assumed euphoric refrain. But that night I realized there might be no end to where she could take me.
* * *
The day before our departure, we packed, ate a quick bite in the Paradise Grill on the ground floor and were back in the room by late afternoon. Honey poured us a brandy and we sat on the terrace and watched the sun begin to set. She said it looked like a ripe peach rolling off a cracked blue plate. Why cracked, I don’t know, but she was right. A few stars appeared, bright pin pricks along the desert horizon.
As far as I knew we’d both avoided news updates from home and stayed true, at least on the surface, to leaving that whole surreal situation behind for the week. Both of us seemed hesitant to acknowledge that in a few hours we would touch down in the too real world once again, from lurid sherbet to overcooked meat and potatoes — and then some.
We sat in silence, and then she surprised me by asking if I thought I’d ever get married. I didn’t even think to answer her seriously, just laughed, because I’d never thought of myself as much of a catch and told her so.
“Oh, but that’s not true,” she said. Silence again, while I thought things over and realized that because of my parents’ deaths I owned a house — ramshackle, but still — and an insurance policy payout. I’d never thought about it beyond helping Honey with the $20,000, which as far as I was concerned she could keep. In my heart I hoped she’d agree to move in with me someday. So what if Montague Street wasn’t as sexy as Elba? We could still have all the things we talked about. But in our good old horrible hometown? Who was I kidding?
“You’re sweet, honest, attractive as hell — and loyal,” she said. “Well, we know all about that, don’t we?” She squeezed my hand and took a sip of brandy. “I’m the one who’s not much of a catch, if you want to get right down to it.”
I pointed out that all the assets she’d named of mine were really hers.
“Why, thank you, darling,” she said and took an extravagant draw on the ghost of a cigarette. “But no. I’m a liability. Case in point.” She raised her glass and finished the brandy.
“What are you saying?”
“Come on, Nic. Haven’t you noticed? I’m practically an alcoholic.”
“You like to drink, so what? It’s Vegas. Isn’t that why people come here?”
“To drink, gamble, and get fucked. You’re right. But that doesn’t change the fact that I was a boozer in training at eight or nine, and a raging success by eighteen. A real whiskey virtuoso.”
“It seems to me you can stop drinking whenever you want. Most of the time you’re sober, after all. You’re not reeling around drunk at the bank and knocking down the interest rates in your biscotti dress shirt.”
“Oh, Nic, I adore you but you’re so goddamn naive. I think you’d have to see me in a straightjacket before you believed I was a lush; me having visions of little roosters with straw hats coming through the keyholes, like that guy in The Lost Weekend. Of course I’m not plastered all the time. It’s all about capacity and timing and being a top-notch liar. Stick around though. You never know, there might be a few barnyard birds on the horizon.”
“I don’t find that funny,” I said.
She apologized and looked away. I got up, walked to the railing, and leaned there for a couple minutes, before turning back to her.
“Do you know what it would do to me if . . . ?” I started over. Because I didn’t want her to think of me as weak and soppy, on top of being so-called naive. “Remember when you taught me how to jive in my bedroom?”
“‘A Lover’s Concerto,’” she said.
“That’s right. You slowed it right down for me. We were eleven, twelve. I was stiff and self-conscious, not graceful and easy like you. I still play that song now and then at my rotten job, when I can stand to hear myself sing it. Mostly I stick to the classical version. It’s not that I’ve come to hate it. How could I? It’s just that I’d been waiting too long for a specific vignette to unfold, a certain moment I see in my mind. I look up from the keyboard one night, as the casino door opens — cue the slow ceiling fan, the bluesy sax riff, pull in close on the piano player’s hands — and the girl who waltzed out of my life at eighteen waltzes back in . . .”
I sat back down next to her, certain I’d blown it with that horrible sentimental side of myself I’d inherited from the old man. But why stop now? I took her hand and pressed a kiss into her palm.
“I’ve been in love with you . . . all my life,” I said. “Marry me.”
* * *
We tied the knot at the Love Me Tender wedding chapel on Las Vegas Boulevard that very night (open twenty-four hours, like everything else in Vegas.)
I wore Honey’s blue shift and she my skirt with the pink blouse so that we could both feel brand new. Our rings were chosen from one of those machines with the claw you see at arcades, packed with all kinds of cheap trinkets or stuffed toys. But Love Me Tender’s machine was dedicated exclusively to rings. Real knock-outs. We slid a dollar into the slot and the claw made the choice for us, “a guaranteed prize every time.” Honey’s was a silver bowling pin that said 2013 Ten Pin Champions and mine a gold horseshoe with white rhinestones, and inside the band read From Hal to Tina, Luck in ’92.
A guy in a black suit and rope tie conducted the ceremony. And then Honey took me in her arms and we swayed to Elvis singing “Crying in the Chapel,” which seemed to me the sultriest prayer ever set to music. I thought about trying it at the casino when I got back, and even gave it a whirl one set, but the prayer somehow failed me — I just couldn’t make it through.
That night when the brides got back to their room, the first thing Honey did was throw all the booze and pot in a bag and toss it in the corner. “It’s just you and me tonight, maestro,” she said. “Pure as thirty acres of Buckthorn County snow.” If I’d ever cared about purity and perfection, I didn’t anymore. I adored her for never having bothered, even when she was riding high, to get that little chip in her front tooth fixed; the one that matched the scar on my forehead. Just a glimpse of it touched some place in me I can’t explain.
The only light in the suite was the iridescent peach and blue glowing in the distance along the line of washed-out hills. We stood beside the bed and removed each other’s clothes in a careful, almost hesitant way, as if we were afraid of hurting something. I felt as though I’d been high since I got to Vegas, but now I somehow felt more stoned, higher than I’d ever been. I couldn’t help thinking of that day in the change room at Robinson’s, and how the sight of her fingers on the buttons of her shirt undid me.
And then we fell into bed and made every kind of love — I don’t mean to be crass, but if I haven’t made it clear, Honey knew every composition and arrangement in the human body’s songbook, from classical to jazz, to soul and gospel, to rock and Delta blues, and was a fearless improviser — until the alarm went off at daybreak.
We flew back to Torrent and had just touched down when the storm closed the airport. It took us five hours to get back to Buckthorn and I just didn’t care.
If I’d thought we might never be together that way again, even stuck in a car in a snowstorm heading back to a town on the skids, even with that whole other thing waiting in the wings, I never would have gotten on that plane.
Part II
But you should know that love is also terrible.
— Carl Jung
13.
A few days after we got back to Buckthorn, Honey told me she’d be driving down to Torrent for a series of year-end bank meetings. She said she’d mentioned them on the plane. I couldn’t recall, but maybe that was because I’d begun feeling anxious about our return to Buckthorn. I worried that I’d fall asleep on the flight and end up muttering, too loud, a few disjointed but incriminating phrases: Wasted MG! Godforsaken swamp! I’ll shoot him again! So I stayed wide awake while Honey, her head on my shoulder, slept like a baby — who had knocked b
ack three shots of whiskey.
The bank meetings would take place over three days. I wanted to drive down with her, but she convinced me to stay put. “It’s a shitty business trip. I’ll hardly see you. The thought of you keeping the bed warm back home is the only thing that’ll keep me upright.” She was adamant. “Don’t worry. I’ll deke out early on day three, because that’s just windup bullshit anyway.”
I finally gave up. It was just as well, because after she left I came down with a bug, or something, that I had probably picked up on the flight. So I bought a few groceries and settled in as the season’s worst storm broke records all over the county. I ate a light dinner with a glass of wine and then went to bed early with a couple of cold tablets to help me sleep.
Maybe the combination of drugs and fever drove my dreams that night, bizarre stuff that woke me five or six times until I finally gave up, brewed myself a cup of tea, and sat down at the keyboard. I couldn’t stop staring at my fingers and wondering if the same hands that pushed a guy in his sports car into a lake had the right to play something from the mind of Chopin, or anyone. I closed the piano and sat watching the wind and snow batter the windows.
That night reminded me of the winter I turned fourteen and took my first long-distance bus trip alone, up to Echo Lake for music camp: all night tucked under my jacket in that warm twilight capsule as the county’s oceans of white-capped fields disappeared behind us and the pine forest rose on either side. The thought popped into my mind that Honey and I should go on a trip like that, somewhere north where the trees grow short and the landscape’s strewn with those deep, tea-colored ponds you can see right to the bottom of. A person could get lost there. You might not be able to avoid it. And then I guess that thought became an idea, almost a compulsion. I blamed it on the late hour, my touch of fever, the drugs. Because for a few minutes the image of her and me on a bus traveling through the blue winter night felt so right, and every other choice so wrong, that I considered driving down to Torrent in the storm, dragging her out of that bank meeting, and insisting, “Drive with me.”
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